Background

I am currently Professor of Statistics at Lancaster University. I have been at Lancaster since 2001, initially appointed as a lecturer. Previously I did a DPhil with Peter Clifford and a Post-doc with Peter Donnelly, both at the University of Oxford.

Since January 2018 I have been editor of Biometrika.

Below are details of my research interests, including current research projects. This site also contains details of my publications, access to software, and results of research looking at ranking of US college basketball teams.

Research Interests

• Computational statistics, in particular sequential Monte Carlo and forward-backward filters.
• Algorithms for changepoint detection.
• Population genetics, including inference for Campylobcater jejuni.
• Inference for diffusions and other continuous-time stochastic processes.

Graduate Training Courses

I gave a course on Modern Computational Statistics (Alternatives to MCMC) as part of the 2012 Graduate Training Programme. Course material is available here.

I gave an invited tutorial on Exact Approximate Learning at NIPS 2012 [Slides].

Awards

• 2006 Adam's Prize. (See the announcement).
• 2007 RSS Guy medal in Bronze.

Current Research Funding

• 2016-2022 StatScale: Statistical Scalability for Streaming Data.
  An EPSRC funded programme grant, led by Prof. Idris Eckley (Lancaster); also with Prof. Richard Samworth and Dr. Rajen Shah (Cambridge).
• 2018-2023 New Approaches for Bayesian Data Science: Tackling Challenges from the Health Sciences .
  An EPSRC funded grant, led by myself and including collaboration with the Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford and Warwick.
• 2018-2023 CoSInES (COmputational Statistical INference for Engineering and Security) .
  An EPSRC funded programme grant, led by Prof. Gareth Roberts (Warwick) and involving the Universities of Bristol, Oxford and Cambridge and the Alan Turing Institute.